


laughing with a mouth of blood

by marketchippie



Category: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Knifeplay, Stockholm Syndrome, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 21:16:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14881340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marketchippie/pseuds/marketchippie
Summary: She is fortunate that Han left his heart behind with her: she needed something to barter.





	laughing with a mouth of blood

In order, she is informed that he likes: beautiful things, things that heal clean, things that someone will miss. Otherwise it’s not a worthy theft. 

Good, fine. She travels light. She gives things away easily. Everything that belongs to her can be hidden beneath her clothes, behind her smile.

She is fortunate that Han left his heart behind with her: she needed something to barter.

 

 

 

He sizes her up with a jeweler’s eye when she meets him in a dingy Corellian bar. (Never mind what she had to broker for the meeting. She has always had quick hands, too quick to watch.) 

“You look like you have a sweetheart waiting for you,” he says.

A test. Of course he knows. Crimson Dawn keeps running lists of Corellia’s unpromising and desperate. Waiting for someone to lose enough to make a deal. She can imagine Dryden Vos running a finger down the list, ticking names.

She has looked up at the sky to see his yacht, sometimes, slicing through the sky on its way to dock. Black and gold, laughter and blood in its wake. She knows what she is bartering for.

At the time, she is only a little good at lying. She has not been taught yet. She has not been honed.

So, yes, when she looks up at him, her eyes shine, wet. “He’s coming back for me,” she says, knowing that somewhere, if he’s still alive, Han believes it. Knowing that he won’t find her when he returns. 

 

 

 

The next time he invites her to a meal, it is on his yacht. The first course is thin strips of raw bantha liver, fanning out prettily into a flower that bleeds onto the white plate beneath. The same liver they use to make jerky; the same animal peeled to stinking hides. But a delicacy, when served raw. One of seven still to come, daintily plated.

She shovels every bite, tasting nothing. Nothing is a delicacy in a starving mouth. 

He watches her eat and drink, lightly turning his knife in his hand. Abstaining, to her surprise. She has not yet learned that wealth hinges on austerity, that when you can eat bantha liver every night it becomes nearly impossible to taste. That the pleasures of the truly powerful are always stranger, far more innumerable in cost.

Keeping an eye on her cutlery—a different knife for every course—distracts her through the meal. She does not yet know to watch  _how_  he holds the blade, the way it turns delicately against the balance of his palm, the way the blade catches the suns’ last light. She does not know that everything he touches turns not just deadly but beloved as it kills.

 

 

 

The sheets on the bed in Dryden Vos’s yacht are aeien silk the same color as the raw liver.

Guilty hearts know no rest—she knows how it’s supposed to go. It is easy to believe that you are guilty and good sleeping fitfully in the alleys of Corellia or curled small in a holding cell.

She has drunk just one glass of wine, not enough to tilt the balance in her head. Still, she accepted his invitation to lay down her head in one of the yacht’s nearly infinite spare rooms and is not surprised when she hears the engines purring into hyperdrive some hours later.

But he does not come to her, and the door locks from the inside. 

Her first night on the yacht is the deepest sleep of her life.

 

 

 

The first time she sees Dryden Vos kill, she has not so much as stepped off-board. It is a cleaning mishap: a fingerprint on a glass, noticed the moment after a holo from his superiors leaves Vos sweating, shaking, furious. His servant is a many-fingered Bith, not wearing gloves. Its wide dark eyes are beseeching as Vos takes him by the collar.

Droids would be cleaner, of course, but that’s the problem. Not so many errors—and it is convenient, at times like this, to have servants who make mistakes. No eyes to look into, no throat to grab, no blood to spill.

“Qi’ra,” he says. “Open the balcony.”

_Qi’ra,_ she hears,  _be perfect or die._

Every second is a test. She doesn’t pause when she presses the button, peeling up the deep-gold blind and the glass beneath. They are pleasure-cruising over the Tralusian sea, then, still idling through the Corellian system yet. They are a blink from home and an eternity.

Outside the air smells wet and clean as home never was. She closes her eyes as the Bith falls, breathing in. Its scream is whistling, soft against the sound of the sea, easily drowned out.

The Bith never had a chance. If she hadn’t learned by now when to hold her hand against the odds, she would never have made it to this particular table.

When she opens her eyes, Vos is leaning against the balcony, face to the moons, hands tight on the gold rail. A sigh moves through his body, a finite moment of pure release.

Only a moment. By the time he turns back to her, his shoulders are as stiff as before.

 “Another day at work,” he says lightly. The lightness doesn’t touch his eyes, bright in his burnt face. 

She understands him, then: she knows what it is to hate those that own you, because they own you.

 

 

 

A contact turned duplicitous on Coruscant leads to three dead on the floor of his event-chamber, surrounded by guests that know not to scream.

It is the first time he has drawn his knives in her presence. She watches, heartbeat up, fascinated despite herself. She has heard the Empire’s fearmongering: a blade of light is a traitor’s weapon. If you care about treachery, that is—the sanctity of the Empire factors low on her list.

Alley urchins don’t need the stories meant to scare rich children into silence; they learn for themselves what lurks in the dark. The Empire’s fears are not theirs. Until that moment, when she watches him sink his last blade into the throat of a suited, terrified humanoid and sees the light bathe his face in red. The look on his face is rapt: the man dies, shudderingly, in Vos’s hands and she sees him breathe again with the same rare release as when he threw the Bith from the yacht. This is the first time she has thought that a man holding a blade of light might be wicked indeed.

Though she knew that before she saw the red light—knew that before anyone died to prove it.

The guests keep dancing to a singer that knows to keep singing. Vos’s bodyguard, a large, soft Kitonak, moves toward the corpses, picking up a foot to drag the first away.

“Stop,” says Vos. He keeps his fingers laced through the handle of his blades, still luminous with red lighting. Points the Kitonak away and flicks the tip of one, beckoning Qi’ra forward from her corner seat, her perfect vantage, her glass of Socorro white. Her palate is improving, and if she keeps her back to the window, her view of the room is clear.

A body lies in her path. A young humanoid man, the slit on his throat burnt black.

No use in learning his features. If a cruelty is happening to anyone else, it is by definition less cruel to her.Her skirt trails over his face as she steps forward: the only way forward is over.

“What do you think?” he asks, quiet. His eyes are red, bloodshot-through and reflecting light.

What Han never understood: she would never have sold herself to a good man.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” she says. Eyes on her own freedom, it is easy for her to keep her eyes on the odds, only on the odds. Never on the bodies that fall, unlucky to have crossed him. She cannot pity a badly-played hand.

She is telling the truth, as he evaluates her, and she is not looking down.

“Be good,” he says, “and I may teach you.”

 

 

 

Her first mission: catching a man counting cards at his table. No blood asked of her. Just the skills she came with: quick eyes, quick hands, keen sense for how good a man thinks he is at sabacc as opposed to how good she is.

She is given a dress for the mission. Not as fine as the dresses will be later—the table stakes not nearly so high as they will be—but a dress all the same. Her arms are bare. He looks at her before she leaves with a collector’s eye. Something is missing.

He reaches out. After a moment, she presents her hand, nearly without trembling. His fingers meet her elbow, tracing down the soft underside of her arm. The bracelet he drapes over her wrist is wider than her palm, a cuff of whorled silver clasping a single red jewel. “Here,” he says. “You will need to show you are Crimson Dawn, if you are to make it out alive.”

Then his fingers tighten around her wrist, and she feels his ring on her skin, turned ringside in. She is vividly aware of the shape of it, the moment before his thumbnail flicks against the side, the moment before it burns the Crimson Dawn sun into her flesh.

The brand cauterizes immediately, clean. She gasps, but does not have the time to scream. The air, when she opens her mouth, tastes of metal, not smoke. In an instant, the burn is only a feeling: a red veil behind her eyes, a shock of pain that delves to the bone, a shard of betrayal spiking in her heart. And his eyes on her all the time, knowledge in that burnt face.

“I know,” he says, like a promise, sliding the bracelet over new-raw skin. It fits perfectly. Unlike his branding, hers can be hidden.

 

 

 

The bartender takes her aside, lays a green hoof on her shoulder. Asks her exactly what she thinks she’s doing with those sharp eyes in this establishment, doesn’t she know who runs the joint?

She turns her wrist up, and the way his hand flinches from her skin is a salve to the burn.

 

 

 

After, the purse he gives her is heavier than she expects. She does not open it in front of him. Let him call that trust, as she flinches back to her room. Perhaps the sole virtue of their arrangement is that she does not have to thank him. She can count whatever is in the purse as her due, and the silk sheets and the bracelet and the Socorro white. As he counts her. 

In her room, she opens the purse at last and sees, atop the neat-stacked credits, a green hoof, severed and cauterized clean.

She closes the case fast and breathes in slow. Slow. Closing her eyes, she swallows until she can speak steady, until she can ring for a droid to clean up the mess.

 

 

 

Next time a job goes wrong, he waits until the contact is in his office. There is no soft Kitonak at the door this time, no need for extra muscle. Only a single fool believing he could skim a quarter ton of hyperfuel off the top of Vos’s shipments like so much cream off a cup of ahchtan milk.

She is in the room, invited. Before his appointment arrives, he does not explicitly say that she will be witness, only itemizes the numbers aloud. By that time she recognizes the gleam in his eye, the pleasure of being underestimated, the license it gives him to balance the scales.

Against her will, she understands this, too, as he gestures to the plush leather of the corner seat. As he lets her slip into the shadows and does not think about what he is permitting her to watch.

The smuggler is Corellian. It hardens her heart that he was caught.

This time, the door is locked and the balcony reinforced shut as the yacht sails into flight mode. No expedience, no impulse, no waiting hungry sky. This time, Vos takes his time.

At the end, there is only a little blood on the backs of his knuckles. He sits beside her.

“What do you think?” he asks again, curiosity in his voice idle and uncomplicated as though waiting for her to taste a sip of wine. Waiting to be amused by her uncultured palate, as much as anything.

“I think it’d be useful for me to learn,” she says.

He makes a small hum of amusement. “Anyone can kill,” he says. “What’s to learn?”

“Not just killing,” she says. “You don’t need spare muscle.”

A faint flicker of distaste on the burnt-taut face. “I’ve known sufficient dumb muscle in my time.”

“Then you must need me for something else.”

The burns on his face do not easily accommodate a smile. Nevertheless, for a moment, Dryden Vos willingly takes the punishment. “I don’t need you.”

She holds her breath. The knives are still in his hand. Anyone kill, and anyone can be killed, at any time. And Corellian urchins die easier than most.

Instead, he opens his hand from around one blade. Unlit now, its bright claws sheathed for the moment. It rests on the surface of his upturned palm, empty and waiting for her.

She snatched it with a thief’s hand, quick and desperate. Even so, her fingertips graze his skin, singeing as she slips into the metal knuckles—too big for her hand and clumsy, but immediately powerful, immediately dangerous.

As she turns her hand, adjusting to the grip, his fingers brush along her wrist, shifting the balance. He doesn’t need her. She doesn’t ask, then, what else is there? She can guess. She doesn’t want to guess.

“Like this,” he says, then lifts his hand to turn her averted face up to look at him, drawing his bloody knuckles along the curve of her cheek.

It is the first time he touches her: as an extension of the blade.

 

 

 

She has never bartered more than she is willing to give away.

 

 

 

A deal, then. For purposes of refining her use, Vos’s Kitonak bodyguard spars with her in her spare hours, flinging her left and right across the room until her mouth tastes of iron. He throws her like he wants her to break on impact. There is no solace among Vos’s servants—of course not, when he would kill any of them as soon as look at them. If someone was an exception, that would make it worse.

Still, the Kitonak is a good opponent for what she’s looking to learn. He is all surface-level weak spots. Even before she can reach them, she can count them and know her aim.

 

 

 

The first time she kills for him, she expects what she gets: ten cases under her bed and the Crimson Dawn’s vast sun burnt into her back.

 

 

 

The kill is an easy one, alone in a darkened alley, on neutral ground. Another double agent that didn’t think ahead before running his mouth. A liar with a cause is a liar waiting to get caught, she thinks.

 She will forget her first, she promises herself. She’s good at that. 

When she returns, plain knife sheathed, mark’s unread identification in her pocket, he opens the wallet. Makes her wait as he reads: “Hurren Wayl,” he says. “Corellian.” Watching her face now.

She only nods and shrugs. “His last ID is, anyway.”

He could be from anywhere. Most people from Corellia start out or end up somewhere else. It’s a midway place: a magnet for false cards and lost dreams. And lost children, but she’s grown past that now.

“Good girl.” He nods to her, turning the wallet upside down. Three credit chips fall. “ _Bad_ luck at the table.”

He slides the credits across the table to her, flicking them away like so much dust off his desk. Even now, she can’t bring herself to waste them. She snatches them up and feels his eyes on her still-desperate hands. Still a thief first, a murderer distant second. Collecting the last of her meager winnings, she turns to go.

“Thank you,” he calls at her back. “Really, Qi’ra, you do good work.”

Disarmingly, he sounds as though he means it. Not that she would ever call him grateful. But the pleasure in his voice is real enough to startle her.

She pauses at the door. “You didn’t think I could.”

“I’m glad you did,” he says. That’s all.

 

 

 

The brand, the next day. This one is larger and will be harder to hide. It cannot be made as a surprise, or perhaps he simply wants her to know what she’s doing these days. What she’s getting into, what will keep happening to her. 

To bare the clean expanse at her nape, he asks her to kneel. No: he tells her, with the unconcern he tells her anything, that she will need to kneel for it, and lets her choose whether or not she will fight. 

She doesn’t, not this. She will not die for pain and vanity. She doesn’t make plans to die, these days.

Not when her hands are quicker and more dangerous than ever.

So she bends her head and his fingertip draws the shape of Crimson Dawn’s sun, idle and knowing, before the brand comes down. The pain when it does is a clear object, something she can taste and feel as she swallows. Which she does, again and again, refusing to open her mouth. She knows perfectly well how much he enjoys the sound of screams.

In the smoking silence after he lifts the brand, she hears him set it down. Then she watches his knees bend, his cape pool around him, as he moves down to meet her eye. He tilts up her chin with such delicacy she nearly weeps, except that he would enjoy that too.

“You’ve earned this,” he says, that same genuine pleasure in his voice.

 No one will touch her now, it’s true. No one else.

 

 

 

After it heals, the first thing she does is find the Kitonak and take a staff to him with such brutality she hopes it breaks the rod. She is winning the sparring bout until the door opens midstrike.

Vos has never come to see her spar before. Now, though, he slips through the door with hardly a flutter of his cape and leans against the wall with unconcern. Perhaps it is not studied. Perhaps it is effortless. She doesn’t think so.

In any case, it rattles the Kitonak enough that she can get him prone in three. When she finally strikes him down—between the eyes, then behind the knees—she hears a slow intake of breath that does not belong to either of the two of them. Proof.

She stands above the Kitonak’s body, staff to the base of his throat (disallowed knives in the training ring), until Vos speaks. “Gelf, you great soft idiot, you left yourself wide open. Get up.”

Her heart is a plucked and thrumming string, set to music from winning while someone watches. It doesn’t matter who. Her hair is in her eyes, full of swear. When she smooths it back and up to its high-tied tail, she feels the edges of the brand and turns her back to Vos. The rest of her aches already, but the burn doesn't hurt at all. She turns back and Vos’s lips are slightly parted.

She dreams of the staff hitting him in the exact same sequence: eyes, knees, down. “Can you do better?” 

She can never read his face. She must look to his body, the slight tension in the sloping shoulders, the tilt of his head. He would lose at sabacc now, she thinks; he does not believe she is counting cards. “Leave,” he says at last, to Gelf (curse _that_ , she’s been doing so well unlearning names. If she could, she’d lay the name of Vos down at the sabacc table and lose the hand on purpose).

The door scrolls open, then locks closed. Then it is only the two of them and the moon-deep night. They are docking in Canto Bight tonight, the windows shut tight in sailing mode as the ground below them glows with far more stolen stars than the sky ever held. For a moment she shivers, alone with infinity and distance and the infinite adrenaline of being a thief in a stolen, costly world.

Then Dryden Vos’s blades are bared and lit, his cape flung over one shoulder, and he is advancing on her with nothing in his eyes but flat, murderous intent. She picks up the staff and realizes how easy it has been for her until now.

How much—it’s not _warmth_ , is it, that look in his eyes, now gone entirely. Frozen, ready.

So she doesn’t think. The staff rests at her hip, then shifts to her knee, whirling, deflecting. Anyone can lie with their thoughts, their face. Less with their body.

It is not a fair fight. Her training is less than a year old, and practiced by someone who has no investment is making her good. Besides which: only one of them has laser knives. In two strokes, her staff is clattering in two pieces and there is cold-knuckled steel at her throat, hot red light close enough to burn her cheeks.

Dryden Vos’s face is so close to hers she can watch the awareness decant back into him like aerated wine. 

He sees her again, at last, for the first time since he bared his blades. Slowly, with great recognition, he smiles—that thin, painful smile that abuses the edges of his burns.

The back of his hand rests comfortably on her collarbone. The buzz of the knives drowns out her pulse, but she can feel it jump against his hand.

“I didn’t think so,” he says, curling a knuckle almost imperceptibly against the base of her throat.

It isn’t a fair fight, which makes it the kind of fighting she know best. Her forehead smashes into his with a satisfying crack, sending him staggering, jarring her teeth together against the tip of her tongue. She swallows blood, and for a singing second she is at home. Back on her feet, and light on them. Until he launches himself back at her, and then—yes, she dodges, she tries, but she is edging closer and closer to the window glass and out of room to run, and not expecting when he throws down one of the knives. She flinches and watches it clatter, but then he has a free hand. Then he has her by the hair, and then he has her by the throat.

Anger is better than pity, better than his satisfaction, she thinks, even as her temple smacks against the glass and recoils. His hand curls in her hair as though he would wield her, pulling back her throat, and then he takes the throat. His long fingers coil around her throat and she sees stars, stars that aren’t there, an embarrassment of riches against the lights outside the window. 

His hand eases. Just. She gasps a mouthful of air, enough air to choke on, muddy with her own blood. The stars refocus, the bright city below. Even now, the lights beneath her can dazzle her. Looking down at Canto Bight with a mouth that smudges a trail of blood against the glass, she wants to eat the city beneath.

Patient or impatient, fast or swift, graceful or clumsy, all she ever is is hungry.

“Look at me,” he says, hand resting with coiled self-control on the back of her neck, waiting for her to take her time. His body is pressed flush against her back, so she feels him breathing just as ragged, just as close to the edge. They are a single, violent creature.

If she looks down, there is no floor underfoot. If she closes her eyes, there is no limit, no end.

It’s never a fair fight. She turns against him and tips her face up, catching his lip between her teeth. Catching his shocked grunt of pain in her mouth. She doesn’t let go.

He doesn’t pull back.

She hears, rather than sees, the buzzing light in his knife switch off. There is no noise in the room, then, to distract from the sound of breath and body. All of her is listening.

His knuckles, still sheathed in metal, slide up and press hard against her thigh, and up. They are cold through her leg wraps, against the banked heat of her. Her mouth opens in shock, wet and red. 

“Risky,” he says.

A motion of his thumb, against the switch. It would be so easy to die like this. One wrong move. Another motion of his thumb, the knuckles— _not_  a wrong move. She gasps. 

“Please.”

She is begging, yes, for what, she doesn’t know. For life, or for the sake of begging, maybe. As he pulls back looks at her with that bright, bare curiosity, wondering what exactly it is he has procured for himself. A curiosity that blots out the killing instinct. Her blood on his lips, and his own.

“Please,” she says again, until his mouth is on hers, until she does not have to beg.

 

 

 

Aeien silk sheets on bare skin, the next morning. As they are meant to be felt: a balm along bruises. 

He has left the knives on her bedstand, switched off. How easy it would be to pick one up. She stirs, feels him tense against her, though his face does not change. Feigning sleep now.

Instead, she moves a hip softly, shallowly against his. He does not open his eyes, but he lifts a fingertip and draws it down her spine, tracing up to the sun burnt into her back. She hisses, arching into it, hating the immediate flood of sensation and that she cannot blame the burn for igniting again. How easy it is to feel this, and how specific.

It is easy to think of the burn as new skin, never yet touched. Not by Han, not by the ones that came before or between. But that means it couldn’t be anything else, anyone else.

Someday, she will tear the skin off her own back, if she has to. If it ceases to be useful.

“No more branding,” she says, soft and light. “Hmm?”

“Whatever would you need another brand for?” he asks. “Everyone can see perfectly well where you belong.”

She wouldn’t even have to light the knife. They are sharp enough at the ends to slit his throat in a moment. If she got away with it.

She does reach out for it. And he lets her, lets her slip her fingers through the hilt and balance. Lets her leverage her hips against his and press the flat centre of the knife to her throat. His breath is quick, excited. He reaches up, hand on hers, but not as a warning. Idly, he strokes her wrist.

“You like them,” he says. 

“Shut up,” she says, and he smiles with the lazy confidence of a man sure he will live forever.

Someday, she will get away with it. Someday there will be no bodyguard. He will be sleeping in earnest. He will not see it coming.

Not today.

“Stars’ end I’m grateful for you.” His hand tracing down her thigh. “You understand.”

“Shut _up_ ,” she says again, and he shifts, already hardening again beneath her.

She turns the knife to press against his throat, the other end tapping sharp against where his heart ought to be, and the sound he makes—she does understand.

Someday there will be someone else to blame. But she is alone in the room, now. With no one to blame her, as she traces his burns from the lines of his face to their natural end. For her curiosity, the ache of the fight deep in her body, the spike of sensation along her skin.

He closes his eyes and tips his throat to the ceiling.

Someday, it will occur to him that he should stop her.

**Author's Note:**

> Q: The "dumb muscle" allusion wouldn't happen to be an allusion to any particular bruiser Vos relations, would it?  
> A: Quinlan Vos Lives, Motherfuckers
> 
> (I tried to finagle something more overt in but it wasn't happening. Still, you can pry the Extended Vos Universe from my cold dead space hands.)


End file.
